Reuters: Google boils down water data for new U.N. environment site. “Vast quantities of raw satellite imagery and data will be distilled into an online platform showing how water ecosystems have changed, and how countries can manage them to prevent further loss, said Google and the United Nations. Focussing initially on fresh water ecosystems such as rivers and forests, Google will produce geospatial maps and data for a publicly available platform to be launched in October in partnership with the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP).”

National Library of Medicine: Ephemera In The Dr. Leonidas H. Berry Collection. “The National Library of Medicine announces new public access to more than 1,600 letters, photographs, and other materials selected and digitized from the Leonidas H. Berry Papers, 1907–1982 manuscript collection, documenting the career and personal life of the trailblazing physician and civil rights advocate. His work is recognized in the NLM traveling banner exhibition For All the People: A Century in Citizen Action in Health Care Reform; the online adaptation of the exhibition features 1,686 digitized items in a digital gallery.”

US News & World Report: Satellite Imagery Company Launches Wildfire Twitter Feed . “A new tool for visualizing and tracking wildfires from the sky was launched on twitter Wednesday by a New Mexico-based startup company, in an effort that combines super-computing capabilities with satellite imagery. Santa Fe-based Descartes Labs began distributing time-lapse video segments taken from satellite imagery of individual wildfires across the country. Hashtags that correspond to the name or location of fires are attached, allowing people to quickly find relevant imagery.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Digital Trends: Relive 1998 as live chat rooms roll out across Reddit in a limited beta. “Reddit is slowly rolling out real-time chat rooms across a limited number of subreddits. Currently in beta, Reddit Chat went live in the summer of 2017 for about 7,000 Reddit users. Now, Reddit is expanding this service, keeping users locked to the website instead of conducting real-time chats on external clients like Slack, Discord, and even IRC.”

Lifehacker: Make Breathtaking Maps With Your Data. “If you collect a lot of geographic data for research, or if you like poking around census files or other databases full of stats, you’ve got a new tool for visualizing that data in a 3D, dynamic map. Uber has released Kepler.gl, an open source mapping software with an easy interface for uploading sorted data.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC News: Life before Google: What was it like?. “In the 20 years since it was founded, Google has provided answers to the most random queries, become a verb and, on Wednesday, received a record $5bn fine after giving itself a bit too much of an edge over its rivals. Some jobs with an emphasis on research have been altered in major ways by its invention, to the extent that it’s hard to imagine how those jobs were once done.”

Science Business: Free access to research papers by 2020? ‘Impossible without radical steps’, says EU official. “A senior European Commission official called for ‘radical steps’ to speed up making publicly funded research in Europe freely available to readers, rather than locked behind publishers’ paywalls. ‘We are today at 20 per cent full open access,’ said Robert-Jan Smits, former director-general for research and innovation at the Commission. ‘Fifteen years ago, we were at 15 per cent open access,’ and in 2016 the EU set a target that all publicly research be open, free, to readers by 2020.”

Forbes: Facebook Hires Top University Brains To Boost AI Labs. “Facebook has hired five top university professors in the US and the UK as part of an effort to strengthen its artificial intelligence research division. The social media giant said the hires to its Facebook AI Research [FAIR] group will help it to set up a new FAIR lab in Pittsburgh, and strengthen existing offices in London, Seattle, and Menlo Park.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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